By Omnia Al Desoukie
CAIRO: Members of the April 6 Youth Movement said the group will pursue legal action against accusations leveled against them in a recent statement by the military council that they are wedging a rift between the people and the army.
On Sunday, the leaders of the movement didn’t provide more details about the official report they plan to file. A day earlier they rejected the accusations leveled against them by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in its 69th statement published in the early hours of Saturday on Facebook.
“The Supreme Council of the Armed forces (SCAF) has to stop the defamation and incitement campaigns against the political powers and resistance groups which had paid dearly for their long struggle until they toppled the ousted dictator,” the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) said in a statement on Sunday.
In the Saturday press conference, members of the movements aid they support a call to a peaceful march to the Ministry of Defense later in the day.
“We will hold the SCAF responsible if any violent clashes taking place,” said Mohamed Adel, media spokesperson of the April 6 Movement, a few hours before protesters were attacked by armed men in Abbasseya, on their way to the Ministry of Defense building.
The march was organized to reiterate “the demands of the revolution” including the dismissal of the prosecutor general, appointed under the reign of ousted president Hosni Mubarak and ending military trials of civilians.
The SCAF’s statement was the first to single out a youth movement in such accusations. It said the movement has for some time been seeking to drive a wedge between the people and the army, but has failed due to recent positive developments.
Many media critics said that if the council had evidence of such acts it should have taken legal action against the movement, not release a public statement.
“It is SCAF who is driving the wedge between the people and themselves by issuing such hostile statements,” said Adel, stressing that the movement did not call for a march to the Ministry of Defense Friday night.
An impromptu march from Tahrir to the Ministry of Defense Friday night to protest a crackdown on protesters in other governorates also ended up in clashes at the same spot as the Saturday march.
“The SCAF uses the same methods of the Mubarak regime, by distorting the image of opposition movements and questioning their loyalty through the foreign agenda and mysterious foreign funds [rhetoric],” said Amr Ali, a leading member in the movement.
“The incitement propaganda led by Major General Hassan Al-Ruweiny, Head of the Central Military Command of Egypt, succeeded in pushing the Abbasseya residents to violently confront the peaceful march which was on the way to demonstrate peacefully in front of SCAF headquarters, resulting in hundreds of casualties, including critical injuries,” ANHRI said.
Ali stressed that the movement had one agenda before January 25, which was to topple Mubarak, and after January 25 it became to fulfill the demands of the revolution.
Adel rebuffed accusations of sedition, saying the movement played a role in reconciliation following incidents of sectarian tension, including earlier this year in the Qeddesine Church bombing and the Imbaba clashes last May.
Adel added that like the Mubarak era, two of its members had their TV appearances canceled for security reasons.
In a speech on the same day, Field Marshall Hussein Tantawy, the head of the ruling Supreme Armed Forces, praised the youth who led the uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.
He called the youth activists “a great product of Egyptian soil, who belong to an ancient people.”
On its part, ANHRI said, “It is a mistake that any official would think that his practices or incitement could pass without questioning because of his position.”
